Being real about psychological safety
Charlie Jones & Brigid Russell
With the positive momentum around psychological safety, the message is really getting out there — especially in healthcare. Now we are at the point of needing a process — a way of enacting psychological safety — that aligns with the content of our discussions. We may know the conditions that enable us to feel truly psychologically safe in a team or group of people with whom we are working. The question is: do we know how to make them real and consistent, in practice?
Over the weekend of 12th-13th September, 2020, one of us (CJ) initiated a Twitter thread inviting challenge and contribution about a question to pose to potential Chief Executive candidates around how they would embrace and express their vulnerability in leading the organisation, and in so doing model psychological safety.
In reflecting on the thread, first, the content was rich. There were clear themes around hierarchy, power gradients, trust and vulnerability, and the importance of moving beyond fashionable buzzwords to specific concrete examples and behaviours. Second, the process of the thread was energising. There was something so free and heartfelt about people participating from across the world, openly expressing their honest and creative views. There was a sense of equality and accessibility in the thread; it felt a bit like wild ‘teaming’ in which people came together spontaneously, and chose to share.
It felt like both the content and process were steeped in psychological safety; it felt freeing and brilliant to be a part of it.
It got us thinking. We wonder how many of the people who contributed so freely to a public twitter thread would have felt able to express their views and ideas as openly in their own organisations. And, we are curious about whether people in formal positions of leadership in those same organisations are actively seeking this kind of ‘crowd sourced’ contribution from a wide and eclectic group, especially for a vital and often highly formalised process like the recruitment of a senior leader.
There is well-established and accessible research demonstrating the case for psychological safety (e.g., see The Fearless Organisation), and helpful resources to support a widespread understanding of what it is, and how to create it. But what about the process? It seems to us that sometimes the content describing psychological safety gets delivered as well-intentioned ‘top down’ messages, and positioned as the ‘right’ things to think according to the experts. But as Myron Rogers reminds us around the challenge of system change, “the process we use to get to the future is the future we get”.[1]
This means that if the process we use to develop psychological safety is top down, expert-led, or involves formal leads or champions for psychological safety, we risk getting more of the ‘same old, same old’. At its heart, psychological safety is about enabling free and expressive participation, playing with ideas, being able to get things wrong, or say the uncomfortable things without fear of recrimination or censure.
Counter-intuitively, if our approaches to thinking about and creating psychological safety are expert-driven and top-down, then we risk dampening the very spirit we are seeking to unleash.
How we nurture and develop psychological safety needs to be a bit edgy, and different. It needs to feel a little bit risky, and free from a pressure to say the ‘right’ things. And that’s exactly how the twitter thread felt. There’s the conundrum: providing safety for ourselves, and for each other, involves taking a risk — the risk of participation, of showing up.
We feel that it is time to promote the notion that we all have an equal and shared responsibility for creating psychological safety, with and for each other. We have all heard the claim that creating psychological safety takes a long time, that it is primarily the responsibility of someone in a ‘position of authority’ to handle carefully and create a climate of trust. We would like to challenge this perception, based on our shared experience during the Covid-19 lockdown of co-creating a series of one-off ‘spaces for listening’ (a lightly structured and facilitated process of three listening rounds in which we each choose our response to a common prompt each time).[2]
Our experience is that it is possible to create a sense of psychological safety within the virtual space of eight relative ‘strangers’ coming together to listen and bear witness to each other, in a facilitated session lasting just under an hour. It is a space of peers; the ‘facilitator’ is an equal participant in the space, there is no leader or expert. All those participating have chosen to take a risk: to trust the process enough; to be ‘brave enough to join, brave enough to share’; and, to make a meaningful connection in a short space of time.
It is a space for reflection, in which we listen to ourselves and to each other. There is a generosity of spirit, of sharing what is happening for each of us and of listening without interruption or judgement. We are able to say stuff out loud; to share ‘who and how I am’, rather than ‘what I do’. People have spoken about the feeling of freedom in just listening without any pressure to ‘take responsibility’ for actions or offer a fix, about the power of ‘being seen’, of feeling able to show up as ourselves (rather than experts or professionals ‘playing’ a particular role), and appreciate one another’s humanity.
People have been surprised at how quickly a feeling of trust and safety is established, and it has led many of us to question why this quality of attention and generosity does not seem to exist for so many in our teams and regular work groups.
We’ve heard the adage that sometimes it is a leader’s job to ‘get out of the way’. We suggest that for the process for talking about and enacting psychological safety, it is important that leaders are present, alongside colleagues, participating equally.
It’s time to take a risk, to get the best of all of us by listening more and being prepared to share more of our thoughts and feelings with each other.
[2] See #SpacesForListening on Twitter
We will be writing more about ‘Spaces for Listening’ soon…
